Reading Lists

A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most.

A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.

A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.

This is the story of the Freeman’s year bearing witness to wild places and a passionate argument for the value of wilderness, told in visceral, immediate language and gorgeous photos.

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.

A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”

Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.

One winter’s night, Ruby Drake’s beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly, Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. 

Frigid, lethal, and wildly beautiful, Lake Superior is as alluring as it is dangerous. Featuring three women living on its shores in three different centuries, this novel—haunting, rich in historical detail, and universal in its exploration of the…

Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here…

From James P. Lenfestey, a collection of poems that lends delicacy and gentle humor to durable, long-lasting love.

By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.

This collection offers a singular perspective on our nation of immigrants and the tensions pulsing in the margins where they live and work.

Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm.

Widowed, penniless, responsible for her beloved baby boy, and subject to the small-town gossip of Harvester, Minnesota—Nell Stillman’s lot is not an easy one. Yet she finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the…

As the author approached his thirtieth birthday in a state of acute anxiety, a bookseller prescribed to him a singular literary diet—the poems of a Tang Dynasty hermit named Han-shan. His pilgrimage to Han-shan’s cave decades later comes to life in…

In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as…

Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist &…

Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the winner of the 2015 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is filled with explosive wit and humor. Yet even at their most surreal—whether taking as their subject a Kaiser Permanente hospital, Shark Week, or…

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. The winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is a…

Esther Lustig has led a seemingly conventional life—marriage, two children, a life in suburban Chicago. Now, at the age of eighty-five, she’s left with questions and her memories, as the unforgettable Esther attempts to come to terms with the meaning…

Growing up in the 1920s, Garnet Richardson watches the birds outside her window, admiring their freedom and beauty. When Garnet is sent away to a lakeside resort town for the summer, she discovers a chance to finally spread her wings, and her…

A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and…

Modeled after the character sketches of Theophrastus, these stories deftly introduce a series of oddly recognizable individuals. In these brief interactions—moving from a nightly Sad Hour hosted by a bar to the moonlit sandbox of a retired army…

On the surface, Alice Marie Krayenbraak has it all: she’s beautiful and witty, a star student and a gifted athlete. But nothing is as it seems: the family farm is failing, Alice’s mother awaits the apocalypse, her parents are planning to send her…